Nonviolence: Its Histories and MythsProfessor Michael Neumann,
Trent University in Ontario, Canada

8 February 2003 in Counter Punch

"...I have neither the moral standing nor the
slightest desire to disparage the courage of those who engage in
non-violence.... But, non-violence, so often recommended.. has never
'worked' in any politically relevant sense of the word, and there is no
reason to suppose it ever will. It has never, largely on its own strength,
achieved the political objectives of those who employed it... There are
supposedly three major examples of successful nonviolence: Gandhi's
independence movement, the US civil rights movement, and the South African
campaign against apartheid. None of them performed as advertised. The notion
that a people can free itself literally by allowing their captors to walk
all over them is historical fantasy..."

Comment by tamilnation.org1."...The
Indian Army in India is not obeying the British officers. We
have recruited our workers for the war; they have been
demobilised after the war. They are required to repair the
factories damaged by Hitler's bombers. Moreover, they want to
join their kith and kin after five and a half years of
separation. Their kith and kin also want to join them. In these
conditions if we have to rule India for a long time, we have to
keep a permanent British army for a long time in a vast country
of four hundred millions. We have no such army...."Sir Stafford Cripps, intervening in the debate
on the motion to grant Indian Indepence in the British House of Commons in
1947 quoted in 'The Freedom Struggle and the Dravidian Movement' by P.Ramamurti, Orient
Longman, 1987

2"..Apart from revisionist historians, it was none other than
Lord Clement Atlee himself, the British Prime Minister
responsible for conceding independence to India, who gave a
shattering blow to the myth sought to be perpetuated by court
historians, that Gandhi and his movement had led the country to
freedom. Chief Justice P.B. Chakrabarty of Calcutta High Court,
who had also served as the acting Governor of West Bengal in
India, disclosed the following in a letter addressed to the
publisher of Dr. R.C. Majumdar's book A History of Bengal. The
Chief Justice wrote: ' My direct question to him (Atlee)
was that since Gandhi's "Quit India" movement had tapered off quite some
time ago and in 1947 no such new compelling situation had arisen that would
necessitate a hasty British departure, why did they have to leave? In his reply Atlee cited several reasons, the
principal among them being the erosion of loyalty to the British
Crown among the Indian army and navy personnel as a result of
the military activities of Netaji [Bose]. Toward the end of
our discussion I asked Atlee what was the extent of Gandhi's
influence upon the British decision to quit India. Hearing this
question, Atlee's lips became twisted in a sarcastic smile as he
slowly chewed out the word, "m-i-n-i-m-a-l!" "
Subhas
Chandra Bose, the Indian National Army, and the War of
India's Liberation - Ranjan Borra, Journal of Historical Review, no. 3, 4 (Winter
1982)

Sometime in the early 1960s, I decided I was too scared to
participate in the Freedom Rides. I have neither the moral standing nor the
slightest desire to disparage the courage of those who engage in non-violence.
But non-violence, so often recommended to the Palestinians, has never 'worked'
in any politically relevant sense of the word, and there is no reason to suppose
it ever will. It has never, largely on its own strength, achieved the political
objectives of those who employed it.

There are supposedly three major examples of successful nonviolence:
Gandhi's independence movement, the US civil rights
movement, and the South African campaign against apartheid. None of them
performed as advertised.

Gandhi's nonviolence can't have been successful, because there was nothing he
would have called a success. Gandhi's priorities may have shifted over time: he
said, that, if he changed his mind from one week to the next, it was because he
had learned something in between. But it seems fair to say that he wanted
independence from British rule, a united India, and nonviolence itself, an end
to civil or ethnic strife on the Indian subcontinent. What he got was India
1947: partition, and one of the most horrifying outbursts of bloodshed and
cruelty in the whole bloody, cruel history of the postwar world. The antagonism
between Muslims and Hindus, so painful to Gandhi, still seems almost set in
stone. These consequences alone would be sufficient to count his project as a
tragic failure.

What of independence itself? Historians might argue about its causes, but I
doubt any of them would attribute it primarily to Gandhi's campaign. The British
began contemplating--admittedly with varying degrees of sincerity--some measure
of autonomy for India before Gandhi did anything, as early as 1917. A.J.P.Taylor
says that after World War I, the British were beginning to find India a
liability, because India was once again producing its own cotton, and buying
cheap textiles from Japan. Later, India's strategic importance, while valued by
many, became questioned by some, who saw the oil of the Middle East and the Suez
canal as far more important. By the end of the Second World War, Britain's will
to hold onto its empire had pretty well crumbled,
for reasons
having little or nothing to do with nonviolence.

But this is the least important of the reasons why Gandhi cannot be said to have
won independence for India. It was not his saintliness or the disruption he
caused that impressed the British. What impressed them was that the country
seemed (and was) about to erupt into a slaughter.
The colonial authorities could see no way
to stop it. What they could see was the increasingly violent antagonism
between Muslims and Hindus, both of whom detected, in the distance, the
emergence of a power vacuum they rushed to fill. This violence included the
"Great Calcutta Killing" of August 1946, when at least 4000 people died in three
days.

Another factor was the terrorism--and this need not be a
term of condemnation--quite regularly employed against the British. It was not
enough to do much harm, but more than enough to warn them that India was
becoming more trouble than it was worth. All things considered, the well-founded
fear of generalized violence had far more effect on British resolve than Gandhi
ever did. He may have been a brilliant and creative political thinker, but he
was not a victor.

Well, how about the US civil rights movement? It would be difficult and
ungenerous to argue that it was unsuccessful, outrageous to claim that it was
anything but a long and dangerous struggle. But when that is conceded, the fact
remains that the Martin Luther King's civil rights movement was practically a
federal government project. Its roots may have run deep, but its impetus
came from the Supreme Court decision of 1954 and from the subsequent attempts to
integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The students who braved
a hell to accomplish this goal are well remembered.

Sometimes forgotten is US government's almost spectacular
determination to see that federal law was respected. Eisenhower sent, not the
FBI, not a bunch of lawyers, but one of the best and proudest units of the
United States Army, the 101st Airborne, to keep order in Little Rock, and to see
that the 'federalized' Arkansas national guard stayed on the right side of the
dispute. Though there was never any hint of an impending battle between federal
and state military forces, the message couldn't have been clearer: we, the
federal government, are prepared to do whatever it takes to enforce our will.

This message is an undercurrent throughout the civil rights struggles of the
1950s and 1960s. Though Martin Luther King still had to overcome vicious,
sometimes deadly resistance, he himself remarked that surprisingly few people
were killed or seriously injured in the struggle. The surprise diminishes with
the recollection that there was real federal muscle behind the nonviolent
campaign.

For a variety of motives, both virtuous and cynical, the US
government wanted the South to be integrated and to recognize black civil rights.
Nonviolence achieved its ends largely because the violence of its opponents was
severely constrained.

In 1962, Kennedy federalized the National Guard and sent in
combat troops to quell segregationist rioting in Oxford, Mississippi. Johnson
did the same thing in 1965, after anti-civil rights violence in Alabama. While
any political movement has allies and benefits from favorable circumstances,
having the might of the US government behind you goes far beyond the ordinary
advantages accompanying political activity. The nonviolence of the US civil
rights movement sets an example only for those who have the overwhelming armed
force of a government on their side.

As for South Africa, it is a minor miracle of wishful thinking that anyone
could suppose nonviolence played a major role in the collapse of apartheid.

In the first place, the ANC was never a nonviolent movement but a movement which
decided, on occasion and for practical reasons, to use nonviolent tactics. (The
same can be said of the other anti-apartheid organizations.) Much like Sinn Fein
and the IRA, it maintained from the 1960s on an arms-length relationship with MK
(Umkhonto we Sizwe), a military/guerrilla
organization. So there was never even a commitment to Gandhian nonviolence
within the South African movements.

Secondly, violence was used extensively throughout the course of the
anti-apartheid struggle. It can be argued that the violence was essentially
defensive, but that's not the point: nonviolence as a doctrine rejects the use
of violence in self-defense. To say that blacks used violence in self-defense or
as resistance to oppression is to say, I think, that they were justified. It is
certainly not to say that they were non-violent.

Third, violence played a major role in causing both the boycott of South Africa
and the demise of apartheid. Albert Luthuli, then president of the African
National Congress, called for an economic boycott in 1959; the ANC'S nonviolent
resistance began in 1952.1 But
the boycott only acquired some teeth starting in 1977, after the Soweto riots in
1976, and again in 1985-1986, after the township riots of 1984-1985. Though the
emphasis in accounts of these riots is understandably on police repression, no
one contests that black protestors committed many violent acts, including
attacks on police stations.

Violence was telling in other ways. The armed forces associated with the ANC,
though never very effective, worried the South African government after Angola
and Mozambique ceased to function as buffer states: sooner or later, it was
supposed, the black armies would become a serious problem. (This worry
intensified with the strategic defeat of South African forces by Cuban units at
Cuito Cuanavale, Angola, in 1988.) In addition, violence was widespread and
crucial in eliminating police informers and political enemies, as well in
coercing cooperation with collective actions. It included the particularly gory
practice of necklacing.

Though much of the violence was conducted by gangs and mobs, it was not for that
any less politically important: on the contrary, it was precisely the
disorganized character of the violence that made it so hard to contain. And
history of the period indicates that the South African government fell, not
under the moral weight of dignified, passive suffering, but because the white
rulers (and their friends in the West) felt that the situation was spiraling out
of control. Economic problems caused by the boycotts and the administration of
apartheid were also a factor, but the boycott and the administrative costs were
themselves, in large measure, a response to violent rather than nonviolent
resistance.

In short, it is a myth that nonviolence brought all the victories it is supposed
to have brought. It brought, in fact, none of them.

How does this bear on the Israel-Palestine conflict? At the very least it should
make one question the propriety of recommending nonviolence to the Palestinians.
In their situation, success is far less likely than in the cases we have
examined. Unlike Martin Luther King, they are working against a state, not with
one. Their opponents are far more ruthless than the British were in the twilight
of empire. Unlike the Indians and South Africans, they do not vastly outnumber
their oppressors. And neither the Boers nor the English ever had anything like
the moral authority Israel enjoys in the hearts and minds of Americans, much
less its enormous support network. Nonviolent protest might overcome Israel's
prestige in ten or twenty years, but no one thinks the Palestinians have that
long.

But the biggest myth of nonviolence isn't its supposed efficacy: it's the notion
that, if you don't choose non-violence, you choose violence. The Palestinians,
like many others before them, find a middle ground. They choose when and whether
to use violence and when to refrain from it. Many many times, they have chosen
non-violent tactics, from demonstrations to strikes to negotiations, with
varying but certainly not spectacular success. And their greatest act of
nonviolent resistance is, as Israel Shamir points out, their stubborn
determination to remain on their own lands despite repeated attacks from armed
settlers, which Palestinian farmers are in no position to counter.

The Palestinians will continue to choose, sometimes violence, sometimes
nonviolence. They will presumably base their choices, as they have always
done, on their assessment of the political realities. It is a sort of insolent
na´vetÚ to suppose that, in their weakness, they should defy the lessons of
history and cut off half their options. The notion that a people can free itself
literally by allowing their captors to walk all over them is historical fantasy.

[1. Even then, nonviolence was taken
with a grain of salt. Oliver Tambo, writing as Deputy President of the ANC
in 1966, said that "Mahatma [Gandhi] believed in the effectiveness of what
he called the "soul force" in passive resistance. According to him, the
suffering experienced in passive resistance inspired a change of heart in
the rulers. The African National Congress (ANC), on the other hand,
expressly rejected any concepts and methods of struggle that took the form
of a self-pitying, arms-folding, and passive reaction to oppressive
policies. It felt that nothing short of aggressive pressure from the masses
of the people would bring about any change in the political situation in
South Africa."]